If you’ve used an iPhone or iPad much, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the ‘shake-to-undo’ motion sensing feature that lets you literally shake the device to undo an event or clear a text box. With a little help of a third party tool, we can bring shake to undo to Mac laptops that are equipped with a sudden motion sensor (SMS), mostly MacBook Pro’s and newer unibody MacBooks. The tiny app works by activating Command+Z when movement is detected by the SMS.Read more »

Need to move your iPhoto library? No problem, it’s easily done by a two-step process – first you need to physically move or copy the picture library to the new location, and then you have to tell iPhoto where the new location is. Here’s how to do this:

Move the iPhoto Library

Open ~/Pictures/ and locate the “iPhoto Library” package, the icon looks like the image to the right – do not open the package you will want to move the entire directory

Move or copy “iPhoto Library” to the new destination by dragging and dropping it to the desired location on a new hard drive or partition

The library moving or copying process may take a while depending on how many pictures you have stored in iPhoto. Waiting is by far the longest part of this procedure, but once it’s finished copying you just need to point iPhoto to the new location:

Point iPhoto to the New Library Location

Hold down the Option key and launch iPhoto

Find the iPhoto Library in the list or click on “Other Library” to manually navigate to the new location and then click on “Choose”

This is typically instantaneous but sometimes there’s a slight delay as iPhoto reads the library file again. Now iPhoto will use the library you have specified in the new location, just be aware that if you chose an another hard drive and then launch iTunes without that drive connected, your images won’t be available.

This tip from one of our commenters is a lifesaver for anyone working with limited hard disk space, since it makes a lot more sense to store things like iPhoto and iTunes libraries to external drives rather than take up disk space with infrequently used media files.

Hinting at an impending release of iPhone 5 and anticipating significant demand, Deutsche Telekom has begun to offer reservations for EU customers who are interested in purchasing the next-gen iPhone, whenever it is released.

Bloomberg confirmed that Deutsche Telekom will hand out coupons starting today to reserve the iPhone 5, but didn’t provide any further release details on availability. Deutsche Telekom is Europes largest cellular carrier, and their USA subsidiary is T-Mobile, which has also been rumored to carry the next-gen iPhone.

The news out of Europe comes a day after a report from BGR claims that US retailer Best Buy anticipates taking iPhone 5 pre-orders soon for a launch in the first week of October. This may correspond with the original pre-order reports for the expected iPhone 5 launch sometime in October.

If you’re a Mac user that requires the usage of Internet Explorer under Mac OS X, you’ll find your choices are generally as follows: run IE on top of Mac OS X with Wine which can be slow and buggy, dual boot Windows and Mac OS X which is a nuisance because it requites rebooting, or use virtualization with something like Parallels, VMWare, or VirtualBox. Virtualization is generally the best method because you can run IE and other Windows apps directly atop OS X, but some of the VM software is expensive and you still need a Windows license key, right? Wrong!Read more »

Digging through some of our reader Mac setup submissions, I realized we hadn’t posted a Mac Mini in a while, so here’s one to fill that gap. It’s a 2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo Mac Mini with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive attached to an external 23″ Acer display, alongside an iPad 2. Elsewhere is an iPhone 4, iPod Shuffle, Apple Remote, and of course the wireless keyboard and Magic Trackpad.

Another iPad competitor is about to enter the stage this holiday season, this time from none other than Amazon. Apparently it’ll just be called “Amazon Kindle”, and while the name isn’t too groundbreaking the preliminary info and specs of the prototype that TechCrunch’s MG Siegler used are quite interesting:

A few other interesting notes from the TechCrunch scoop: a second 10″ model will probably come out next year in early 2012, possibly with a dual core CPU and some other expanded features, there may be an SD card slot, and Amazon apparently isn’t working with Google whatsoever on the device, despite the fact that it runs a variation of the Android OS and all Android apps will run on the hardware:

Google’s Android Market is nowhere to be found. In fact, no Google app is anywhere to be found. This is Android fully forked. My understanding is that the Kindle OS was built on top of some version of Android prior to 2.2. And Amazon will keep building on top of that of that over time. In other words, this won’t be getting “Honeycomb” or “Ice Cream Sandwich” — or if it does, users will never know it because that will only be the underpinnings of the OS. Any visual changes will be all Amazon.

I’m a big fan of the iPad and of the Kindle, so I’m pretty interested to see what Amazon puts out and how well it runs, and the $250 price point with free Amazon Prime access will be really compelling to a lot of people. Amazon could really be onto something here, but the big question is if they will succeed where so many others have failed in the fight to compete with Apple’s runaway hit, the iPad.

For those that follow along with all the jailbreak stuff and rely on third party Cydia tweaks, the iPhone Dev Team has released redsn0w 0.9.8b7 which is aimed at making the existing iOS 4.3.5 jailbreak easier, but also adding support for jailbreaking iOS 5 beta 6 and beta 7.

What’s the advantage to using redsn0w 0.9.8b7? For 4.3.5 users, you can now perform a tethered jailbreak simply by pointing at the iOS 4.3.5 IPSW rather than 4.3.4. Other than that, the incremental release is primarily aimed at iOS and Cydia devs who are looking to update their apps and tweaks for the latest iOS 5 beta, and the latest beta 7 users still need to point at beta 6 IPSW.

If you’re already jailbroken there isn’t any reason to use this version of redsn0w over past versions.

The Terminal in modern versions of Mac OS X enforces a new monospacing character width standard, which in laymen terms means you no longer have to use monospace fonts in the Terminal. That means you can now use any font you want, even Comic Sans like the screenshot shows down below (hooray?).

iPhone’s HDR mode takes great pictures, there’s no doubt about that. What is not so great for avid photographers is that when you have HDR mode enabled, the iPhone will store two versions of all photos you take, which at 5 megapixels a pop can quickly consume an iPhones available storage. For some situations, the two photos look so similar that they just look like duplicates too.

The solution is to stop iPhone from saving both the normal and HDR exposures:

Tap on “Settings” and scroll and tap on “Photos”

Under the “HDR (High Dynamic Range)” option, slide the “ON” button to “OFF” next to “Keep Normal Photo”

Close out Settings

From here on out, if you have choose to take an HDR photo, only the HDR exposure will be saved. As before, if you aren’t using HDR then the normal picture will still be saved. This makes a lot more sense to me and I’m slightly confused why storing the duplicates is the default option.

Disabling this feature prevents duplicate image storage and will save you a lot of storage space over time. Admittedly, this will be much less necessary when iCloud rolls out this fall since the photos will be stored automatically in iClouds free 5GB plan, if you use it at least.

When a new Finder window is opened on the Mac desktop, the user defaults to seeing the new “All My Files” folder, rather than the users home directory. This is a change that arrived with the latest versions of OS X (began in Lion, but continues on through Mavericks), and while it can be useful for those who don’t manage their files, it’s not for everyone. Fortunately, you can change the setting back to the original Mac behavior of opening directly to the users Home Folder.Read more »